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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29406741">Anakin vs Water</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/armchairaloof/pseuds/armchairaloof'>armchairaloof</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Fluff and Humor, Gen, why is it so much fun to write anakin as a distressed parent to an alien murder child</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 10:35:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,980</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29406741</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/armchairaloof/pseuds/armchairaloof</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Ahsoka has space asthma (ish) and Anakin builds her a humidifier.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Anakin Skywalker &amp; Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi &amp; Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi &amp; Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi &amp; Anakin Skywalker &amp; Ahsoka Tano</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>121</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Anakin vs Water</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Ahsoka?”</p><p>Anakin knocked on his padawan’s door, harder this time. He’d looked everywhere for her since the last time he’d been to her door with no answer. She had to be in here.</p><p>No answer. Again.</p><p>“Artoo,” he said into his wrist comm, “open Ahsoka’s door, will you, buddy?” A bored cycle of binary answered him and then the door hissed open. “Thanks, buddy.”</p><p>The room was at half-lighting but he could just make out a lump on the bunk.</p><p>“Ahsoka!”</p><p>Anakin rushed inside but staggered back as he was hit with a wave of humid air. “Holy mother of me…” He squinted and tried to see through the sudden fogginess of the room as he headed for the bunk.</p><p>The lump grunted and rolled over to reveal Ahsoka’s face. Anakin bent down and reached a hand out to her forehead. That’s what people did in the holofilms when someone was huddled under blankets, right? Her head was warm, but he really didn’t have a reference for what her temperature <em>should</em> be. Ahsoka’s eyes stayed stubbornly shut.</p><p>“Ahsoka, are you hurt?” he asked softly. They’d been back on the ship for almost a full rotation now. If she was hiding an injury from their last battle, it could have worsened or become infected by now.</p><p>A deep wracking cough was his only answer. Anakin tried to get her to sit up, but she swatted at his hands as they tried to help her.</p><p>“’M fine,” she rasped. “Just can’t breathe. Too dry.”</p><p>He frowned and let her settle back in her blankets. Then Anakin crossed the room to the atmo control panel next to the door and blinked. “Snips, this says the humidity is at over ninety percent—”</p><p>How the durasteel plating wasn’t already rusting through to realspace was beyond him.</p><p>“Not enough,” the mountain of blankets said weakly in between small coughs.</p><p>Anakin stopped his fiddling with the touch panel to give his padawan a fond, yet uncomfortable smile. Call him a sand lover all you want, at least you could breathe the air in a desert. It was a swamp in here. A hot, humid swamp.</p><p>That was swamps, right? Or was it a marsh? One of the two, definitely. He still got all those water-planet words mixed up sometimes. They should just call them what they were: water. Water plus land equals water-land. Simple as that. Water-land had a nice ring to it, now that he thought about it. He’d have to tell Obi-Wan that one.</p><p>He shook his head to clear it. All this humidity was starting to get to him.</p><p>(Water plus air equals water-air.)</p><p>Focus. His padawan was sick, probably. He assumed, at least. Did Togrutas get colds? The evidence to the affirmative was right in front of him in the form of a slightly-paler-than-usual and <em>much</em>-quieter-than-usual padawan. If it wasn’t for the moisture in the air clouding his brain he’d appreciate the latter more, but the former worried him.</p><p>Worried him quite a bit, actually.</p><p>“What do you need? Medicine, more pillows? Soup? My mom always made me soup when I was sick. Don’t know if that works for Togrutas though…” He looked at the datapad in his hand and quickly stuffed it in his robes. He’d originally come to Ahsoka’s quarters to ask why she hadn’t completed an after-action report on their last mission. Ahsoka was always on time with her reports, to his own master’s infinite enjoyment.</p><p>“Maybe the sense of responsibility skips a generation,” Obi-Wan had told him archly when Anakin complained that Ahsoka was already a better report-writer in the first month of her apprenticeship than he was now as a Jedi Knight.</p><p>“I just need…” Ahsoka’s voice rasped from her bed. Anakin skidded to his knees in front of her, desperate to hear what he could do to help her. His kneecaps would protest later, but they could get in the back of the line. His padawan needed him.</p><p>“Yeah, Snips? What is it? I’ll get you anything, anything at all,” he promised.</p><p>“More… humidity.” Anakin slumped forward slightly, defeated. He could get her anything but that. “The air is too dry,” she continued in a small voice. “I can’t—” Her whole body curled in on itself as she coughed and Anakin felt his heart break a little. “I can’t breathe in this dry air.”</p><p>As if to punctuate her point, the ship’s air recyclers kicked in then, sending streams of cool air through the ventilation ports near the ceiling. Ahsoka shivered and covered her face with one of the blankets to block out the new, slightly drier (but still felt saturated in water to him) air.</p><p>Anakin vowed there and then to do <em>something</em> to help ease her breathing. For now though he laced his words with a strong Force suggestion and tried to sound calm and reassuring as he said to the shaking mass of blankets, “Sleep, Ahsoka.”</p><p>He watched as the shaking slowly ebbed and then soft snores rumbled from beneath the layers. The fond smile was back on his face as he carefully uncovered her face so she wouldn’t suffocate in her sleep, and then as silently as possible he stood and left her quarters.</p><hr/><p>It turned out that Anakin was pretty good at building a water-air machine. He’d fixed plenty of moisture vaporators in his day and the general idea was the same, just the opposite goal. Instead of taking water out of the air, he was putting it back in. What a concept. His old buddies back home would be rolling in the dust with laughter if they could see him now.</p><p>It took him less than an hour to complete once he had his epiphany—</p><p>(“<em>Water</em> in the <em>air</em>, Artoo. Do you get it? Water-air machine!”</p><p>Artoo had trilled long-sufferingly, somehow managing to convey in binary both his mockery for his master along with his agreement to help build the device.)</p><p>—and scavenged the right parts from his old mech builds onboard. Artoo projected a diagram of a vaporator to refresh his memory and then he just… built the opposite of that. Easy, really.</p><p>“Anakin, why haven’t you been answering my commander’s meeting requests?” Obi-Wan’s voice was exasperated. He couldn’t imagine why, it’s not like Anakin was hiding. He was in the main hangar bay where he almost always was when he wasn’t doing something else.</p><p>Anakin glanced over his shoulder from where he was hunched over the work bench. “Because if it was really important, I knew that you’d comm me directly or come find me.” He hadn’t been answering Cody’s pings because he hadn’t gotten them. Hadn’t actually checked his comm since he left Ahsoka’s sickbed. “And look at that, you came to find me. Here I am!”</p><p>“Yes, here you are,” Obi-Wan sighed. See, he was right. It can’t have been that important if Obi-Wan wasn’t immediately launching into battle strategies. “This doesn’t look like ship maintenance.”</p><p>“It’s not.” He finished welding a rotator brace to the base of the water-air machine where the motor was and snapped the plastoid covering over the section of durasteel. No rust on his watch.</p><p>“Then what, might I ask, are you doing?”</p><p>“You may,” Anakin replied. He gave his device one last look through, then nodded in satisfaction. It’d hold up. He flipped his work goggles up to his forehead and presented his work for Obi-Wan to see. “It’s an anti-moisture vaporator!”</p><p>“An anti…”</p><p>“Moisture vaporator, yup.”</p><p>Obi-Wan looked first at him, then at the water-air machine skeptically. It didn’t look like much, he’d give him that. A semi-flexible casing of plastoid formed into a cylinder made up the bulk of the unit, with a currently empty bag of transparent sheeting attached at the end to store the water when in use. It could be turned in different directions and angles so the water vapor was aimed where the user wanted it to go, <em>and</em> so the vapor wasn’t being wasted on corners of the room where said user’s dry-lunged master would be standing as far away as possible from his own cursed creation.</p><p>Anakin shrugged and scratched at the base of his skull where the goggles strap cut into his skin. “Ahsoka’s sick,” he said simply.</p><p>Obi-Wan’s entire posture deflated. He uncrossed his arms and took a half step forward without seeming to realize it. “She is? Where is she?”</p><p>Anakin felt the corner of his mouth lift at Obi-Wan’s obvious concern. “In her quarters. Said she needed more humidity to breathe better.”</p><p>“Of course,” Obi-Wan said with a frown. “This is probably Ahsoka’s first extended period of time on a ship with recycled air. Togrutas are used to a higher moisture content.” He rubbed his chin agitatedly. “I should have thought of this.”</p><p>“Hey, it’ll be okay.” Anakin shifted awkwardly as he held the water-air machine. He was glad that he didn’t tell Obi-Wan that’s what he’d been calling it in his head. He probably would’ve laughed. “Once I get this running in her quarters, she’ll be good as new.”</p><p>Obi-Wan nodded but he still had a pained look to him that Anakin didn’t like. If it was anyone’s fault for not seeing this coming, it was Anakin’s. He should have been studying up on Togrutas and should have known if any accommodations needed to be made for her. She was his padawan after all.</p><p>“Well, is it ready for her?” Obi-Wan jutted his chin toward the heap of mismatched plastoid in Anakin’s arms.</p><p>Anakin raised his eyebrows at the droid next to the work bench. “Seal of approval, Artoo?”</p><p>Artoo swiveled to point his ocular sensors at the water-air machine, then tilted up to face Anakin again and gave one solemn beep.</p><p>Anakin nodded in confirmation and addressed Obi-Wan, “Artoo says as long as we use filtered water and calibrate the moisture readings to compensate for the ship’s pressure—”</p><p>“He did not say all of that.”</p><p>Shrugging, Anakin replied, “It’s ready.”</p><p>“Well, let’s get it to her.” Obi-Wan turned and strode away from him toward the hall.</p><p>“Wait, Master—” Anakin started, then jogged to catch up to him. “You don’t have to—”</p><p>“Of course I’m coming with,” Obi-Wan said without slowing his pace. “Ahsoka is sick.”</p><p>He had a point, Anakin conceded. He flopped the empty bag of the water-air machine over his shoulder and tried to catch up with his master.</p><hr/><p>Visible water vapor floated from the ugly machine at Ahsoka’s bedside toward her face. She was surrounded in a hazy mist and looked like she could be floating herself for how content she seemed.</p><p>Anakin felt like hacking up a lung or two just looking at her. All that water just hanging in the air…</p><p>“Thank you, Masters,” she said, her eyes still closed peacefully. She hadn’t coughed once since he turned on his abomination.</p><p>“Oh don’t thank me, young one. This was all Anakin.” Obi-Wan smiled widely and rested his hand on Anakin’s shoulder.</p><p>Anakin’s first reaction was to bristle at that. It should have felt patronizing. He knew the anti-moisture vaporator was silly. Ugly, too.</p><p>But looking at Ahsoka and knowing that she felt better— more comfortable, because of something he did… He peered at Obi-Wan out of the corner of his eye. The old man had the same smug look on his face he had every time Anakin built something that didn’t look exactly perfect or did something unexpected to get a job done… It was the same look, but it still felt different somehow. The smugness looked… proud.</p><p>Maybe it was the air composition slowly changing into something closer to liquid than breathable gas. He’s said it once, he’ll say it a million times: water wasn’t meant to be breathed in like this.</p><p>Yeah, that was it. <em>Water</em>.</p><p>He’d blame the water for the warm feeling blooming in his chest too.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I used to live in the tropics, now I live in the dry, dry not-tropics and my humidifier is my best friend &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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